


But Keep a Tidy Soul

by coffee_mage



Series: Permanence, perseverance and persistence [1]
Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe
Genre: Clint Barton: The early years, Implied Child Abuse, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-27
Updated: 2012-09-27
Packaged: 2017-11-15 03:33:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/522685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffee_mage/pseuds/coffee_mage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no such thing as a job that isn't prostitution.  Every job you ever do, you're selling some part of yourself to gain something else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But Keep a Tidy Soul

Not every foster home was shitty.  Not every person who took kids in was doing it because they had ulterior motives.  But there were enough that were shitty—even though they looked okay on the surface--enough pale, wan women who turned a blind eye to their husbands crawling out of the marital bed and going to ‘check on’ little boys.  One was, after all, enough.  That was all it took for Barney to decide they were hitting the road.  That was all it took for Clint to know that you couldn’t trust anyone who offered you something nice.  There was a price for everything.

 The circus was a bit of an improvement.  The Barton brothers worked and they got a bunk in the clowns’ trailer, at least one decent meal a day and a small paycheque.  They got only what they earned and they knew the price of everything there.  Then Barney busted his leg helping the elephant trainer and, suddenly, Barney couldn’t earn his way.  It all fell to Clint.  He needed a way to earn not only his way, but Barney’s.  He needed to be doing more than odd jobs.

 He needed to be a headliner, or at least working with a headliner, if he was going to be able to pay off the stupid bill they’d left behind at the hospital.  Hospitals were the only debtors that ever managed to track the circus down and if they caused too much hassle, tried to get money too hard, Carson would drop you like a rock, unless you were a headliner.  

 Unfortunately, Clint had a fourth grade education and he was thirteen years old.  He didn’t know what the hell he was going to do, but it had to be fast.  A few days after Barney broke his leg, Clint had a few shots of rum in his belly (the clowns thought he was hilarious when he was drunk so they kept him well stocked) and not a whole lot else when he ended up sitting in the doorway to the acrobats’ trailer during the show, when all the trailers were abandoned.  He’d been on security detail the night before and all day, so it was his sleep break now, even with the show on.  

 A girl headed past, head covered in a kerchief, someone he didn’t recognize.  “Hey, you lost?”

 She froze and turned. Maybe she was familiar.  Maybe.  He couldn’t tell with her back to the light.  “Are you?”  Her voice had a soft accent to it.  Ah, one of the new ones the acrobats had brought in, then.  A family from somewhere in Russia or somewhere like that.  

 “Nah, sorry.  You want me to move, you heading in?”

 She shook her head, coming closer.  “No.  What are you doing here?”

 “Getting drunk.”  He held up his little flask.

 “Is that really a good plan?  Aren’t you a bit young?”

 “I’m a lost cause.”

 “Really?”

 He shrugged.  “Might as well be, for all I can dig myself outta the hole I’m in.”

 She sat down next to him.  She smelled of incense and spices and he couldn’t help taking notice that she was incredibly beautiful as he shifted to make a little more space.  “What hole is so deep you cannot get out?”

 He leaned his head against the doorframe.  “Somehow, I gotta pay off the hospital bills and earn Barney’s keep until he’s better.  Don’t see how I can.  Lotta money and I’m just… me.”

 She peered at him with a look of vague confusion mingled with interest.  “Every person has something worth offering.”

 He snorted.  “Yeah.  Right.  Everyone but me.”

 “Then you are truly extraordinary.  If you are truly ordinary, you are the only one I have ever met who was as such and I have met many people.”

 Clint shook his head slowly.  He shouldn’t have had that last shot and everything was starting to spin a little.  “I’m not ordinary.  I’m less than ordinary.  I don’t have anything that’ll get me out of this mess.”

 “Sometimes, we must trade the things we have to get the things we need.”

 Clint laughed.  “Yeah, well I’d sell my soul right about now for something that would get this sorted out. It’s about the only thing I have on offer here.”

 Her eyes, a vivid green as they picked up the blinking lights from the midway, widened.  “Never say things like that.  You do not know what you are saying, but when they take your soul, you are unmade.”

 “It’s just superstition.  There’s no such thing as a soul.”

 “Sometimes we do not have the luxury of believing in the soul or feeling it, but in the end, I think it must be there or there would be nothing for them to take from us, to hold ransom in return for the rest of us.”

 Clint frowned.  “They?  Them?  What are you running from?”

 She shook her head.  “In a place like this, you ask that?  Foolish boy.  You ought to know better.”  She got to her feet and headed away.  “My act is up shortly, goodnight.”  She pulled the kerchief from her hair and it cascaded down her back like liquid fire.  

 He didn’t see her in the morning and no one remembered her when he asked about her.  The following afternoon, he threw a rock at a bottle and shattered it into smithereens.  And the right man happened to be walking by.  Clint wondered if perhaps the girl had just been passing through to steal his soul.  

 But nothing is ever free, and Clint paid, every day of his tutelage, for what he was learning.  Sometimes he paid with his body, sometimes with his blood, sometimes with his morals.  Finally, the price exacted was too high and he took his services elsewhere.

 

 

 

He had three kills for every year of his life by the time a man in a suit sat down in front of him and told him it was over.  He was not going to be making any more money selling his unique skill-set to the highest buyer.  His identities were all compromised—and the suit listed every single one of them, so yes, Clint knew it was true.  They’d watched his last four jobs.  They had all the details.  They knew his contacts.  Clint was not escaping.  

 He wasn’t selling himself to the highest bidder anymore, no, but the suit smiled blandly and explained that he would be earning the opportunity to use his skills for some government agency with a huge, unwieldy name.  Earning it.  As if he wanted to.  

 But he didn’t have a choice.  Well.  He did.  He could spend the rest of his life in a small cell, with no windows.  He could never see the sky again.  The ventilation was, the suit assured him, made up of vents no wider than six inches.  The doors were on an airlock and he would be gassed if he managed to get out of them.  The cell had its own generator.  No, this wasn’t something special for him, this was standard for keeping dangerous people who wouldn’t work with them.

 Most worked for them within a month, but they had one hold out who had been moved to four different locations as each one was compromised and was now pushing seventy years old.

 So yes, Clint had a choice.  He could work for them now, or he could go mad, be rebuilt by them and then work for them later.

 The suit shook his hand and congratulated him on his choice.  Clint would have to earn every bit of freedom he wanted.  He would live under the suit’s constant supervision.  He wouldn’t eat, sleep or piss without the suit knowing it, every single thing he did.  And if he was very, very good and didn’t step out of line even once, then he would maybe be allowed a night off the grid in two years’ time.  Clint had no favours left, nothing to barter with, even his life.  They owned it now, these people who held him.  He’d have to buy it back, one day at a time.  He signed the documents making their ownership formal and he followed their orders.  Sometimes, it meant selling his body, sometimes his blood, sometimes his morals, but his life was no longer his to sell.  One day, he even discovered he wasn’t waiting for an escape route to reveal itself.

 

 

 

He had only just earned his life back, only just realized that SHIELD trusted him, when he looked down the shaft of his arrow, spotted the girl in front of him and froze, his breath catching in his throat.  The flickering light above them caught in her eyes, green vivid against the red-rimmed exhaustion in her face.  The red hair cascaded around her shoulders in matted clumps.  Her lips parted as if to speak and he shook his head, dropping the arrow down.  He hadn’t recognized her in the photos, but he knew her now.  She wasn’t much older than she had been, impossibly young still, compared to him, but it was her. 

 “I sold my soul to you,” he said, and the voice calling into his ear for a report went silent.  The silence was unnerving and he wavered, brought his weapon back up.  

 “Many men have sold me their souls.  Which one are you?”  She watched him cautiously, her eyes flicking from the tip of his arrow and back to his face.  The accent she’d had when he first met her was gone now and she responded to him with his own accent, or very nearly.

 “That’s not important.  What is important, is that I want to buy it back.”

 “Barton,” Coulson called.  “Barton, what are you doing?  Why didn’t you tell me you had prior contact?”

 "What are the terms?”  She seemed confident, as worn out as she was, visibly, and Clint wondered how much of this was an act, how much he was playing into her game.  

 “You’ve killed a lot of innocents.  You’ve used your unique skillset for the wrong people too many times and we can’t let you keep doing that.  I’m here to kill you.”

 “You’re Hawkeye.”

 "The one and only.  Best marksman in the world.  I never miss.  Literally.  I haven’t missed a shot since the last time I saw you.”

 “You’re saying you can kill me without a thought?”

 “I’m saying that even if you kill me, SHIELD has this place surrounded and they will not hesitate to destroy this building with me in it if it means they get you.  And I don’t want the last shot I ever line up to be one I didn’t take.”

 “So I’m dead either way.”

 “Take the shot, Barton!” Coulson called.  “Take the shot!  Your orders are to kill!”

 Clint worked his earpiece out with his shoulder, keeping his arrow trained on her.  “You come quietly.  You don’t fight us.  You let me fully immobilize you before anyone else moves in.  You’re brought to a secure facility.”  His earpiece now dangled at his shoulder, Coulson’s voice a tinny echo buzzing on the edge of his hearing.  “You’re given an opportunity to talk to my bosses and to have them evaluate whether or not they believe you can ever be deprogrammed thoroughly enough to be trusted as an agent.  If so, they’re probably going to put me on your 24/7 security detail to punish me for doing this, after they spend about the next month putting me through the psychiatric wringer and questioning me on where I know you from.  If you don’t pass, I still go through the psychiatric wringer for this one and you end up living out your old age in a cell owned by SHIELD, knowing that a single wrong move will get you killed, instantly.  I probably still end up on your security detail for all of the time I’m not out on specialist missions, until I die.”

 “Where _do_ I know you from?” she asked.  

 “Dubuque, Iowa.  Somewhere around 16, 17 years ago.  It was at a circus.”

 “The drunken child.”

 “Sounds like me.  I found my place in the world the day after I offered to sell my soul to you.  I figured you took payment and I got what I wanted.”

 “And now you see I’m real.”

 “And whether you took my soul or not, I’m giving you one favour.  For the sake of cosmic balance or whatever.  This is it.  Do you want to die, or are you going to lie down and let me taze you?”

 She stared into his face one last time, then lay face down on the floor.

 In more ways than one, with a taser shot and a rapelling arrow's cable, he started off an explosion that would change everything about who owned what parts of him.


End file.
